Grounded cognition and the role of musical expertise in shaping synesthetic metaphors among a music speech community

What is it about?

Cognition is grounded in context. This article explores how music experts and non-experts cognize and verbalize the attributes of musical sounds. The study demonstrates that music professionals conceive of such sounds through synesthetic metaphor. The results also demonstrate that musical expertise can lead to the emergence of synesthetic metaphors that are specific to musical discourse.

Featured Image

Photo by Bhautik Patel on Unsplash

Photo by Bhautik Patel on Unsplash

Why is it important?

Synesthesia was thought to be a purely neurological phenomenon. However, this study shows that this phenomenon can have a learning component and can arise in certain professional contexts; at least this is what the analysis of the use of language in the context of music shows. That is, experts and non-experts can cognize and verbalize certain specialized phenomena, such as musical sounds, through synesthetic metaphor.

Perspectives

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In my doctoral thesis, I wrote a paper on synesthetic metaphor as a type of conceptual metaphor. And I thought that my work on synesthetic metaphor was finished. But years go by, until one day I had a class with a music group. That day I arrived too early and the group was engaged in a conversation about some music topic in a corner of the room. I couldn't help but overhear their conversation and what I heard resulted in this article. when they talked about musical sounds they used synesthetic metaphor systematically. Et voila!!! I began to explore the use of synesthetic metaphor in the context of music.

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